Some dog owners don't care that leaving mess on the ground could make a child
go blind. How do they live with themselves?

“Mummy, please, please, PLEASE can we get a dog?” Generally speaking, I am a wet and indulgent mother, always first in the queue for the ice cream van. But in one respect only, I am impervious to my children’s pleas. No dogs. Not ever. Dogs are for mad people.

Oh, all right: I do know some lovely, and perfectly sane, dog owners. Most of them live in the country, where their pets have lots of room to run around slaughtering small mammals, instead of spending their days peering dolefully through the net curtains and digesting their owners’ shoes.

I know some nice dogs, too, even though every single one of them pongs. (It seems that dog owners, like halitosis sufferers, are the only people who can’t smell it.) But when you are raising small children in a city, man’s best friend starts to look very much like the enemy.

My area of east London is dense with dogs, the various breeds reflecting the mixture of social classes. There are pugs and French bulldogs for the hipsters; whippets and terriers for the richer professionals; squat Staffie crosses for the black and white working classes. They all bound around our local park, off the leash, yapping and scrapping and, above all, crapping.

I am not especially squeamish about excrement, having spent much of the past seven years wiping it off human bottoms; but the stuff that dogs produce is unholy. Smellier and stickier – and far more inconveniently placed – than the poo of any other domestic animal,it also contains a parasite which, if ingested by humans, can lead to blindness. One gets the sense that even the dogs themselves feel a bit ashamed, as they squat, hind legs trembling, to curl out a steaming coil right under the perfect tree for a picnic spot.

My own children are, mercifully, past the toddler stage of picking up hardened lumps of dog poo and putting it in their mouths, in case it should turn out to be chocolate. But they tread on it, pedal their bikes through it, sit down on it and then instinctively use their hands to wipe it off their clothes. Every trip to the park feels like a dance with death, or at least toxocariasis.

None of this is new, of course. Britain’s cities were just as encrusted with dog’s mess – or “D’s M” as my father called it – when I was a child. Whenever we went on a family walk, my father would tiptoe cautiously ahead as if on mine-clearing duty, barking out the co-ordinates of any unexploded turds hidden in the long grass. “D’s M at one o’clock!” he would yell over his shoulder, and the family crocodile would obediently lurch to the left.

But that was in the Seventies, before the concept of “scooping your poop” had migrated here from America. These days, dog owners have a legal – never mind moral – obligation to pick up what their pet leaves behind. Some do, and chuck it dutifully in the bin. Others (the aforementioned mad ones) bag it up neatly and then leave it under a lamppost, or even hanging from a tree, for the poo fairies to collect.

But there are still plenty of dog owners who simply saunter away from the scene of the crime. They fear neither the hard stares of the civic-minded – believe me, I’ve tried – nor the threat of official sanctions. And no wonder: last year, local councils received 74,000 complaints about dog fouling, but handed out a mere 2,868 fixed penalty notices. Budget cuts, apparently, mean councils can no longer afford to patrol public spaces, catching irresponsible owners in the act.

Even if they could, a £75 fine doesn’t really cut it. If the thought of causing blindness in children doesn’t deter these people, they are unlikely to be chastened by such a feeble wrist-slap from the state. These are the sociopaths of the dog-owning fraternity: not just mad, it seems, but irredeemably bad.